Pittsburgh Airport Terminal Record · a reproducible companion
A $1.7 billion terminal, its budget up 54 percent, opened in Pittsburgh for a level of traffic the region has not seen in twenty years. The Airport Authority named two grants and stopped counting. The audited record fills in the rest.
Read the published story at the West Hills Gazette ↗
On a Saturday in October, about ten thousand people walked through an 811,000-square-foot terminal that Pittsburgh International Airport had just finished, thirty-three years after the last one opened. The Airport Authority put the cost at $1.75 billion, called the terminal a generational investment, and counted 14,300 jobs and $2.5 billion in economic activity. What the officials on the dais did not do was explain two numbers that sit underneath the celebration: how far the budget had traveled, and how far the airport's traffic sits below what the building was designed to hold.
Original budget, September 2017, to final cost, April 2025 — a 54% increase, roughly $600 million, across four revisions.
The budget was announced at $1.1 billion in 2017. It reached $1.39 billion by February 2021, $1.57 billion by October 2023, and $1.7 billion by April 2025, an increase the Authority attributed to inflation and additional improvements. Each revision is a matter of record; the escalation recomputes from the ledger in this archive.
The new terminal is designed for 13 to 15 million passengers a year. In 2024 the airport served 9.95 million, between 31 and 51 percent below that design. Pittsburgh drew close to 20 million passengers in the late 1990s, when US Airways ran a hub here; after the airline de-hubbed the city in December 2004, traffic fell to a low of 7.8 million by 2013 and has recovered only partway. The building anticipates a return the numbers have not yet delivered, and airport officials did not, at the ribbon-cutting, account for the gap.
Airport officials did not explain why a facility designed for 13 to 15 million annual passengers was built when 2024 demand stood at 9.95 million.
The Authority named $129.7 million in federal money from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and $80 million from the state. It did not give the bond total or the annual debt service. Its own audited 2024 financial report does. The Terminal Modernization Program was carried by $832.67 million in Series 2021 airport revenue bonds and roughly $415 million in Series 2023 bonds, $1.25 billion outstanding at the end of 2024, with about $410.5 million more issued in April 2025. Debt service on the 2021 and 2023 bonds runs roughly $77 to $81 million a year through the late 2020s and totals $2.5 billion in principal and interest by the time the bonds mature in 2056. Before the program, the same report shows, the Authority had defeased its old bonds and carried almost no long-term airport debt.
Federal and state grants total $209.7 million against roughly $1.66 billion in revenue bonds. Those bonds are repaid from landing fees, concessions, and parking, not local taxes, which is the Authority's answer to who pays. The passengers who use the terminal, and the airlines that serve them, carry the rest for the next three decades.
This companion exists so the numbers above can be checked rather than trusted. Every figure traces to a document that is archived here and fixed by a SHA-256 hash: the published story, the Authority's 2019 and 2024 audited financial reports, the federal grant records, and the commissioned economic-impact study behind the 14,300-jobs claim. A reader runs one command and the archive re-hashes each source, confirms every figure resolves to one of them, and recomputes the cost, capacity, and debt figures from the ledger.
python 03-harness/check.py
The published story → West Hills Gazette
The 14,300 jobs are the Authority's figure, from a study it commissioned; how many of them outlast construction, the Authority did not say. The building will hold fifteen million people. Whether they come is the wager the bonds have already placed.
Pittsburgh Airport Terminal Record · Brian Nuckols · data CC BY 4.0, code MIT. Prose pending an independent journalism-prose review before it is final.